The Thing

by William Carpenter

In the old horror classic, The Thing, they brought
the monster to the quonset hut frozen in ice.
The corporal or private on sentry duty tossed
a blanket over its face, only the blanket was
electric, it was plugged in; you watched the ice
melt, you saw the shadow rise over the soldier
reading his book. Watch out! you said. Behind you!
with every kid in the Majestic Theater, but
the man heard nothing and was strangled or his skull
crushed. That way the Thing entered the human world,
your world, and you walked home squeezing your eyelids
closed, trying to forget what they had seen:
the Thing out in the blizzard tearing up the huskies,
the clusters of spore pods in its hand.
Now you have kids yourself. One of them’s at the shoe plant,
one’s away at school. Your wife is on sabbatical.
You are the only person home. You’re thinking
about the future, how it grows smaller and closer
every time you sleep; so you stay up, you walk
from room to room, you choose the guest bedroom with
the electric blanket and you turn it on. Outside, it’s
January. The moon changes the snow to an albino desert,
miles of cold sand twisted into hills, and, beyond that,
the snowy mountains. You turn the blanket up and read.
You hear a sound somewhere, like melting ice.
There’s movement. Something is thawing out, something
frozen stiff for a long time is rising under
the electric blanket. Its shadow fills the bedroom wall.
It’s larger than you thought. The phone is useless.
There’s nobody for miles. The Thing.
It has been walking towards you all these years.
It throws its covers off. You wait for it to kill you but
it’s smaller than you remembered and its face is human;
it looks tired, like someone carrying a message
that no longer counts. You are not scared. You’re not
a child at the movies but a grown man standing
before a mirror in a vacant house, a man shaking
from coffee and insomnia who wants something to be
final the way the Thing was final in its time,
a root vegetable with all the answers, hairy
and bulletproof forever, the thing inside us that
could save us, maybe, from the thing we are.